Over the next two years, Asheville’s BB&T office building will be transformed into a luxury hotel and renamed the Vandre Nouveau Hotel, the Asheville Citizen-Times report today. John McKibbon of McKibbon Hotel Group is developing the new, independent hotel.

The Vandre Nouveau is part of a new brand of Starwood hotel known as Starwood’s Tribute Portfolio. Starwood is based in Stamford, Conn. Here’s more from the Stamford Advocate:

Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide chose an iconic Miami hotel to pioneer a new brand dubbed Tribute, with the new initiative to operate on a similar model to the hospitality giant’s Luxury Collection label that allows independent hotel owners to plug into the marketing muscle of Starwood.

Starwood (NYSE: HOT) is among the largest employers in Stamford with more than 1,100 employees entering 2015 and plans to hire at least 200 more by the end of next year. In February, former CEO Frits van Paasschen left the company over disagreements with the board on strategy, with Starwood installing as interim CEO Adam Aron, a seasoned hospitality executive.

Starwood’s planned new Tribute brand was in the works under van Paasschen, according to the Wall Street Journal, which reported that participating hotels would pay 10 percent of their room revenue to become part of Tribute, getting their properties listed on Starwood websites and their guests able to earn and redeem points under Starwood’s Preferred Guest (SPG) program.

So, Asheville, what do you think of the new look for the old BB&T? The Citizen-Times story goes on to say that the structure will be wider at the base and will have balconies. There will be a ground-level restaurant, meeting and event space. Part of the building will be remade into high-end condos, as well.

The Asheville nonprofit Food Connection is partnering with Wicked Weed Brewing and its Cultura restaurant, the YMCA of Western North Carolina, and Red Wing Enterprises for the event aimed at helping service industry workers.

One of the biggest immediate impacts has been the release of about 200 people from the Buncombe County jail, a long-sought after goal by some local officials who want to convert the county jail from a holding pen for low-level, nonviolent, poor suspects to a lockup reserved for serious offenders.

I’ve worked in this building…. it’s terrible! The interior spacing is all wrong on nearly every floor…the amount of work to get that joint updated is considerable and it only makes sense to redo the exterior at the same time.

It also makes sense to change the usage… rent is too high for most small businesses…. plus the interior is unmanageable, parking is awful, etc.

I would love to see it turned into flex space including some affordable housing, but this particular building, its positioning in downtown and the cost to bring it up to modern standards is just too damn expensive for anything other than retail/hotel.

I am not a fan of the current exterior … and this seems better (w/ a dash of “meh”)…..plus the ACT article does mention that the design could change..

I hate it. Asheville isn’t the Asheville I enjoyed. It looks more like a generic suburb of Atlanta. In 10 years it will not be unrecognizable. The only thing left will be the small slivers of mountain views you see through the high rises built by investors from other states. The building should stop. Homes, hotels..all of it. We need some kind of underground movement. Not violent or destructive, just something to make it harder to ruin Asheville more than it has been already.

And to be more specific: which bits of *modern* downtown architecture do you like?

Don’t talk about the Pack Square buildings or Grove Arcade. Can’t build ’em like that these days. You’re going to get renovations like the Capital Center / First Union on Patton (another 1964 building that got the rooftop treatment) or dry-docked cruise ships like the Aloft or lightly-cladded concrete cubes like Hotel Indigo, or the Hyatt Place where 3 Brothers was, or the AC Parking Deck / Hotel.

You’re so comfortable hatin’ on the old BB&T that you haven’t noticed how every large-scale building project downtown over recent years has turned out butt ugly, and how every ongoing and proposed project is butt ugly.

At least the quasi-brutalism of the BB&T building is rooted in some sense of historical influence. With each new building it seems like each architect is trying to start a brand new trend but each one fails miserably.

Anything other than “high-end condos and luxury hotel” will be met with howls of derision, so why bother?

But since you asked, how about some combination of hotel, condos, and workforce housing? McKibbon is plop-plop-plopping hotels in this town, three of them right there in the space of two blocks. But they’re doing nothing to alleviate the dearth of affordable housing for the employees of those hotels. They’re profiting mightily from the evolution of Asheville into a tourist/rich-person-only enclave, and giving nothing back except for really bright lights on the roof.

You want affordable housing, market-rate condominiums *and* a full-service hotel located all in that one building? And for someone who is in the hotel-and-parking-lot business to suddenly go into affordable housing development, just because it’s the “right thing to do?” Keep dreaming.

Serious question…when has downtown Asheville ever had workforce housing? I keep hearing about this desire to have workforce housing downtown, yet I wonder when was the last time it existed in critical mass.

Fact is, this (in part) represents what the City of Asheville has stated it wants right now–to build up and increase the tax value of land in the city center, since annexation is no longer an option.

I think of workforce housing as existing in the teens through the 50’s. Head of Montford, Stumptown, Highland St. neighborhood, Broad St. neighborhood, Valley Street, MLK neighborhood. Regardless of what is built, current land prices plus infrastructure are the immediate barrier.

It was hilarious watching city councilman Smith last night pleading with a developer to “please, please, partner with me, please” to bail him (that is, provide affordable housing at his expense and lose money) after a pattern of years of harassment and extortion of developers by the city. Too funny.

I’m a fan, except for that bank of lights up top. Aloft’s bank of lights already are distracting for nighttime views of the city, and nowhere near as tall as those will be. Hope Zoning makes then tone them down.

We’ll agree to differ on that. The BB&T is what it is: it’s an honest International Style building. This just looks… meh, the kind of building that will look not-quite-right very quickly, which is what we’ve come to expect from John McKibbon, parking lot architect.

(That rendering is weird, because it doesn’t include the nine-story AC Hotel / parking lot that you’d assume would be visible from that position once the renovation’s done. Also weird to show it at twilight, not daytime.)